I am occasionally invited to speak on (mostly conservative) talk radio stations on the constitutionality of certain issues, and, not surprisingly, lately my conversations with the hosts of those shows have centered on Obamacare’s constitutionality, but also its future and that of the Republican Party in the wake of the government shutdown.  And I have maintained — bucking conventional wisdom — that the current unpopularity of the Republican Party due to the shutdown will fade as more Americans realize that Obamacare is not the panacea the president has claimed — that it is more expensive and less comprehensive, and that Obama’s promise that, “If you like your current doctors and current health care, under Obamacare you can keep them,” is a brazen falsehood.

I base my belief on the countless Americans now learning that first-hand (http://www.nbcnews.com/health/thousands-get-health-insurance-cancellation-notices-8C11417913).  Recently a couple in California, both Democrats, received a letter from their health insurance provider, Anthem Insurance, informing them that in compliance with Obamacare their current health insurance coverage has been canceled.

But don’t worry, the letter said, Anthem is moving them to a “new, suggested Anthem plan” with benefits that mostly match their current plan, but at a “28 percent increase” in monthly premiums.   In addition, “to keep costs down” Anthem is offering a new network of providers that may or may not include their current doctors — the ones they, um, like.  And adding insult to injury, under the new plan they are required to have a “pediatric dental benefit” — a dental plan for their kids.  The couple has five children, the youngest is 26, and at their age they have no plans to have more kids.  They have both indicated that they “can’t wait” for the mid-term elections to express their disgust.

This is not atypical. Today, there are countless websites now sharing similar horror stories about the higher costs and poorer coverage of the plans Obamacare is forcing them to join.

Politically, I think this is a watershed event because, Democrat or Republican, for nearly a century the political class has agreed on one thing.  Don’t mess with the Middle Class, for it represents the “Center,” which is the key to political survival.  And yet, from the evidence so far, the one group that Obamacare really hurts is the Middle Class.  The poor will at least qualify for subsidized health care.  The rich, other than bearing the brunt of the taxes, are immune.  But that California couple — solid middle class Americans — and many thousands like them are seeing costs go up and the quality of care go down.

Maybe not very soon, but someday soon, I think Americans will look back and think, “Maybe those Republicans so dead set against Obamacare were on to something.”

Representative Trent Franks (R-AZ) believes Obamacare is unconstitutional because it violates the Constitution’s “Origination Clause” (Article I, Section 7), which says that “All bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives.”   Consequently, he has filed suit in federal courts and he has introduced a resolution expressing the “sense of the House” that Obamacare violates that clause.

So what’s his reasoning?  First, that Obamacare is undeniably legislation that raises revenue.  There are 17 revenue-raising measures in the bill, including the individual mandate and medical-device taxes.  Also, the Supreme Court ruled that Obamacare is a tax, and taxes are meant to raise revenue.

So what, you say?  Obamacare originated in the House.   No it didn’t according to Rep. Franks and, increasingly, other legal experts.

To set the stage, in the fall of 2009, the House unanimously passed H.R. 3590, the “Service Members Home Ownership Tax Act of 2009,” a nondescript piece of legislation giving tax breaks to military servicemen.  Whereupon Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid “amended” that bill, removing all of the language — all 714 words — granting servicemen tax breaks, and substituting the nearly 400,000 words that Sen. Reid, on his own official website, called the “Senate Health Bill.”  That “Senate (not House) Health Bill” is better known as Obamacare, and it includes $675 billion in revenue-raising measures.

So Obamacare was an amendment, attached by the Senate, to a House bill giving tax breaks to military servicemen, meaning the only part of Obamacare that originated in the House was the language — those 714 words — describing those tax breaks, and those words are nowhere to be found in the Obamacare legislation that is the law of the land today.  And speaking of the Supreme Court, in ruling that Obamacare was a tax it stipulated that, as a tax, it “must still comply with other requirements in the Constitution.”  Chief among those “requirements” is that tax legislation must originate in the House.

Makes sense to me, and although I am no legal scholar, I am a long-time student of the Constitution, which purposely gave the House, and not the Senate, the revenue-raising power.  Simply put, many Founders viewed the Senate as somewhat “elitist,” and too aloof from the electorate, what with its six-year terms, statewide constituencies and appointment by state legislatures (before the 17^th Amendment).   The House was “the people’s branch.”  Members served only two years and were directly elected by popular votes, meaning they were the most beholden to the people’s will.   So it made sense to give the most awesome power a government can possess, the “power of the purse,” to the governmental branch closest to the people.   Today more than ever — as Harry Reid has demonstrated — that’s not the Senate.

Americans today are more dependent on the largesse of the federal government than at any time in our history.  Government dependency — defined as those persons receiving one or more federal benefit payments — is the highest ever (47 percent).  Welfare spending is also the highest ever, at $700 billion annually.  More Americans are on food stamps than ever before, nearly 40 million, almost double what it was when President Bush left office.  And, of course, America is $17 trillion in debt.

When Republicans complain about this, they are labeled uncaring and unmindful of the fact that most of them were born into affluence, or at least had solid middle-class backgrounds, that gave them a distinct advantage over the nation’s less fortunate.

So what would the Founding Fathers say about all of this?  Surely there were many less fortunate Americans in the 18^th Century who couldn’t take care of themselves and needed assistance in order to survive.  How did the Founder’s approach this age-old problem?

By firmly recognizing that, yes, less fortunate Americans needed help, but the government should be the helper of last resort.  The best way to assist the less fortunate was through local civic institutions — family, church, neighbors, community groups, charitable organizations — which were far more familiar with the conditions that caused poverty and hardship among their fellow citizens, and thus were better able to address the causes of the problem.  To the Founders, a food stamp or other welfare program administered in Washington and intended to benefit citizens in localities hundreds, even thousands of miles away, was unfathomable.

Emphasizing local citizen organizations over distant government bureaucrats also made sense because, while many citizens in the 18^th Century were truly disadvantaged, many others — as is even more the case today — were gaming the system due to laziness and irresponsibility.  As such, those in the local community organizations, having regularly interacted with their fellow citizens, were far more likely than a federal bureaucrat working in Washington to identify the truly needy, as opposed to the lazy and irresponsible.

Finally, in the Founders’ day citizens were far less permissive. Personal, moral and civic responsibility were considered crucial to the community’s, and nation’s, welfare, and those who exhibited those traits, even if they had fallen on hard times, were welcomed and helped.  Those who did not were not.

By contrast, in today’s culture of “moral relativism” we have become so permissive there is hardly any stigma attached to living off the government, and in some programs — food stamps being one — the government has actually encouraged enrollment.

Ben Franklin once wrote, “The more public (government) provisions that were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer.”